Dam I really think it would be better if we didn't have a "two party system" in the x86 field. Damn, I'm glad that we have two parties. We're lucky we're not paying Intel $1000 for buggy 200MHz Pentium Pros in 2007.
Anyone know what happened to Hawking's proposal for information loss? Isn't it merely supposition that information can't be lost? A desire for a neat and orderly universe, which once drove the (now abandoned?) notion that the curvature of the universe is "just right"?
is nothing but a politician's way of telling the public "We're doing something about it!" Actually working is a minor, secondary consideration, just like with the post-Katrina relief effort and the "surge" in Iraq.
Doing things right would invove raising taxes and/or redirecting money from pet pork projects, and putting experts in the decision-making roles rather than political hacks.
The technology is within our grasp now. If tomorrow the entire human race decide to commit the entire gross planetary product to build a space ship capable of sustaining 10,000 people indefinitely, It would certainly be possible. Robots and raw materials could be launched into orbit by rail guns. Large Hydroponic farms would be built in space. Geo-domes are already proven to work. All we really need is to do is find a suitable planet. Even if it cost 10 trillion dollars and took 4000 years to get there. And the whole colony would die a horrible death half a light year out, because some contractor substituted inferior materials to save a few dollars.
It's just a physical fact. Acclerate for 1 G for a year and you reach speed c. How one does that is another matter Yeah, if you've gotten past Newtonian physics you'll realize that maintaining that 1 G is a wee bit of a problem as v approaches c.
Well, evidence for the feasibility of long distance jumps has already been observed. It's called quantum tunneling. Yeah, but who wants to visit the stars one elementary particle at a time?
Forget even what we can do in the next 100 or 1000 years.
There's not a "hypothetical" end of the planet as he suggests, it will happen with certainty, but not for a very, very long time. So... what will we be able to do in 1,000,000 years or so? Usually I'm not for this kind of "the future will be amazing beyond our wildest dreams" stuff, but when you're talking that sort of timescale, I really don't see how you can use the word "impossible." Conventional wisdom is that technology increases exponentially. (I call it CW, because I don't know how you would actually measure it.) If that is correct, we'll make vastly more progress in the next 100 years than we did in the past 100.
And compare the present to 1907 in such areas as transportation, communication, and computation. Or medicine and our fundamental understanding of biology. Physics. Materials science. Energy. Our intellectual and technological progress has been phenomenal.
Where we'll be in a billion, or a million, or a mere thousand years, is beyond comprehension.
It ain't like "discovering" the Americas. For that, all that was required was some ships to get over there and some hard work when you arrived. What you needed to survive is available, get to work.
It's vastly different with "space colonisation". First of all, you gotta get off this planet. Not a trivial task. We barely get payload into orbit, and to leave the gravity of earth, you even need a bit more thrust. Then there's the distance. We're not talking weeks or months on the ocean, we're talking years and decades in interstellar travel. Air is limited and gravity isn't, problems that don't exist when "colonizing" on a planet. The Europeans who (re)colonized the Americas during the Renaissance had to take along their own food for the journey. Taking along your air is merely an increment to the difficulty.
And when you arrive, your chances to actually get a hospitable planet are slim to nil. You will have to bring air, food, water and so on along. At best you'll have energy in the form of solar energy at your hands, and that's all you got. Presumably we'll pick a planet that will support us. Or at least one that's close, and send the automated factories ahead of the people.
Colonizing the galaxy is possible. And I side with Hawking in the opinion that it is our destiny, if we want to survive as a species. But I wouldn't bet my money on a Star Trek like progress, where in merely 200 years we'll have colonies all over the galaxy. First of all we have to find a solution to the light speed problem. Yes, that's the big hurdle. Otherwise I'd say a comparison of present technology to 1807 technology makes the idea of galactic colonization very promising. But our present understanding of physics seems to suggest that there are certain fundamental problems that no technology can possibly bridge over.
http://www.ideacenter.org/contentmgr/showdetails.p hp/id/1155 And here is a good blog post that calls attention to the utter inanity of their spin. (And in the "fair and balanced" treatment of the topic by Wired's [pseudo]science writer.)
No, let's call a spade a spade: s/inanity/dishonesty/
"junk DNA" reminds me of the mysterious "dark matter", or "god" or whatever words we use to name something we know nothing about and don't understand, to give them some sort of magical status. It would probably be better to call it "unknown DNA", or "DNA Incognita", or even why not "Here be Dragons", to better remind us of how ancient maps were conceived (answer : it took ages to "publicly" discover all continents and isles). a) We're accumulating more and more evidence that dark matter actually exists.
b) The term "junk DNA" was invented to describe pseudogenes, where are indeed "junk" in one sense of the term. From there it spread to other DNA Incognita, with the sort of casual disregard for semantic aptness that is a hallmark of humans' use of language.
One thing I'm sure is that Nature doesn't waste resources, only Humans do, so each yet unknown thing has certainely a very good reason to be there. Lots of biologists used to make that same erroneous assumption, but Gould flagged the error 28 years ago. Lots of Slashdotters need to get caught up on that.
If I find a pencil on the sidewalk, the most obvious thing is someone dropped it.
I see life, and am at awe of its complexity. I have to conclude something designed it. Strange logic. Why would "something" design life to be complex instead of simple?
Especially if, as you propose, that something is God? Couldn't an omnipotent Being just as easily have put our souls in cinder blocks and endowed us with telepathy and levitation, thus doing away with the entire overly-complicated edifice of biology altogether?
For that matter, why do we need bodies at all, whether biological or cinderblockical? Couldn't He have just created us as naked souls that live where He does? He doesn't seem to need a material world to live in; why should we?
(All that's just by way of pointing out that your "reasoning" isn't actually reasoning at all; it's just a post hoc rationalization of your beliefs. Please don't blame the messenger; it's nothing personal.)
Why flame? A different point of view can lead to a break through. You initial hypothesis doesn't have to be correct to discover something useful. Intelligent Design isn't a hypothesis; it's propaganda pure and simple.
Ok, I suppose it's still "useful"... as propaganda for the theocrat wannabes.
And who knows, maybe some day God (pick your deity here) will reveal him/herself to us unbelieving humans and we'll be proven wrong. Supposedly the Christian God already did that. For some reason he did a poor job of the proof. (I can only conclude that He isn't as omnicompetent as He's cracked up to be, or else he doesn't actually care what we believe about Him. Or, of course, perhaps He's simply a myth.)
Unexpected things happen every day. And magic (including Intelligent Design) has had precisely a 0% success rate at explaining any of them.
But who knows; maybe you're right and astrology will lead to the next big breakthrough in our understanding of the universe.
I thought when this 'Junk DNA' was mentioned many years ago that given time, that opinion will be reversed. Thus there was an advantage to ID biologist who would have the opinion, 'cells are an incredible biological computer with beautiful design, this is great fun reverse engineering it all, and there won't be Junk DNA because that goes against God creating life, so lets keep looking for its purpose' Except that ID apologists explicitly deny any knowledge of who the Designer was, let alone knowledge of what He might have done in a design. So their current claim that their "theory" predicted this is an outright lie.
This is the usual sort of post hoc religious self-rationalization. If you pray for rain and get rain, your prayer was answered; if you pray for rain and don't get any, it was also answered - with "no", for reasons known only to the Rainmaker.
I haven't read the ID astronomer's book The Privileged Planet, but reviewers say he tries to have his cake and eat it in exactly that way: some aspects of the universe are hospitable to life, so a Designer must have designed them to make life easy for us; other aspects of the universe are inhospitable to life, so the Designer must have designed them to provide challenges for us.
If the (neo)con artists who are pushing ID as a science want to make predictions that diverge from the predictions of real scientists, well and good. But first they need to come up with a theory, or even a hypothesis, that isn't so slippery that they can spin any observation as support for it. Then they need to make predictions that actually follow from their theory or hypothesis, rather than just jumping on the latest news story and claiming "I told you so!".
BTW, the ID apologists' claim that this discovery isn't compatible with evolution is also a lie, or perhaps merely a sign of how ignorant they are of their favorite theory to criticize.
Finding out that not all viruses cause "sickness," and that the RNA injection of "friendly" viruses is a source of evolutionary change. Not sure what you're saying. Are you aware that retroviruses operate by getting their own RNA inserted into the victim's genome, so that the victim's own cellular machinery generates copies of it?
IIRC their relics have proven useful in constructing the evolutionary tree, because the traces of a retrovirus that infected a common ancestor can sometimes still be spotted in the descendent species.
I'm not aware that any viruses have been "friendly", but presumably all retroviruses contribute somewhat toward our genetic diversity.
The result of natural selection frequently isn't the "best" solution but rather whatever happens to work. Exactly, and it's a popular misconception that evolution is always about the "best" and anything that is 1% "better" is going to dominate. Which simply isn't true, or our appendix would have vanished long ago. The fact is that appendicitis isn't enough of a problem to select against it strongly. The appendix just doesn't help, so the genes to maintain it aren't selected for either, resulting in the slowly fading vestigal organ. FWIW, there's an idea out there that as the appendix gets smaller the likelihood of infection gets even higher, so evolving it away is "stuck" at a local optimum.
it made me think that you either have to accept that the world just 'is' and somehow evolution came up with flight and all the other mind boggleing things animals are capable of, or a creator is behind it all. Perhaps you should pause and consider all the things that evolution didn't come up with, such as levitation and telepathy.
or is there a creator? i think both take a leap of faith. Why? There are piles of evidence (literally!) that evolution has happened on a grand scale, and known mechanisms for causing it. With creators, you have piles of mutually contradictory claims (sometimes even with in a single religion!), and precisely nil evidence for any of them.
Also, "I don't see how that could have evolved" is not an argument against evolution. The universe isn't constrained to work according to the dictates of our childhood intuitions.
Whenever I read something like this, I get a reminder how poor is biologists' comprehension of Computer Science, Information Theory, and languages. So, 90% of genes aren't "junk" after all. To anyone who does know something about the aforementioned topics, duh! That hasn't actually been established yet. What has actually been established is that some portion of the non-coding DNA has a function other than coding for proteins.
And that's not exactly news. I read it in a science popularization magazine years ago.
First, evolution would weed that sort of thing out in a hurry. According to various science blogs, that's precisely what biologists originally thought. The evidence doesn't seem to support it, though. There's lots of strange stuff that goes on in biochemistry. Some sequences excel at getting themselves copied elsewhere in the genome. Boring old corn (maize) has a sequence that has had phenomenal success at that; it's spattered all over the genome, insertions amid earlier insertions of itself.
This has led to a view that we should think of the cell nucleus as an environment and DNA sequences as organisms, some of which evolve to exploit various properties of the environment. Those that can do that without also killing off the creature carrying them can prosper on their own terms.
Second, ever tried compressing a DNA sequence? They don't compress very well! Meaning, they don't have much redundancy. It could indicate a lot of noise rather than a lot of efficiency. Random sequences are practically incompressible.
Again, the science blogs are reporting that Gould and a co-author called attention to the fallacy of assuming that everything in biology is optimized by evolution. They did that in 1979, over half-way back to the beginning of time so far as our understanding of genetic encoding goes. You're reasoning things out the way biologists did a couple of generations ago, but they've given up on both the reasoning and its conclusions.
So called "junk DNA" actually appears to be functional. Well that just proves it once and for all - it's not junk, hence it was designed properly. Therefore, God exists! Sadly, the (neo)con artists at the Discovery Institute are making exactly that argument.
The argument is flawed as hell, but that doesn't diminish its propaganda value in a society where so many people are absolutely eager to be misled about reality.
Why it was called junk before you'd ask? Because our definition of what is useful wasnt all that accurate.. just looking at so called open reading frames and declaring everything else to be junk does not work. The science blogs are reporting that the "junk DNA" was originally invented to describe pseudogenes, relics of functional genes that have been copied (defectively) into other locations of the genome and are no longer active as genes. It is "junk" in precisely the sense that we use "junkyard" for the collected relics of once functional automobiles. The extension to everything of no known utility was later, and has led to a lot of popular misconceptions. But I think there has alwas been at least a few scientists interested in it, and nowadays many biologists are careful to use the term "non-coding DNA" for what some people would dismissively label as "junk".
The common view nowadays, AIUI, is that anything that is conserved over evolutionary time must have some function that causes disruptions to be selected against. But a lot of it -- the precise amount still unknown -- does in fact appear to be "trash". One of the blogs mentioned a paper whose authors described excising very long sequences from rodents' genomes, without any observable side effects.
Slashdot Mirror
The innerweb is a disruptive technology! Why didn't someone warn us?
News at 11.
But is an example of that fact going to lead to an interesting discussion on Slashdot?
Other than that, it's ok.
A whore will fake an orgasm for you, if you pay for it.
Oh, and astroturf isn't real grass.
is nothing but a politician's way of telling the public "We're doing something about it!" Actually working is a minor, secondary consideration, just like with the post-Katrina relief effort and the "surge" in Iraq.
Doing things right would invove raising taxes and/or redirecting money from pet pork projects, and putting experts in the decision-making roles rather than political hacks.
There's not a "hypothetical" end of the planet as he suggests, it will happen with certainty, but not for a very, very long time. So... what will we be able to do in 1,000,000 years or so? Usually I'm not for this kind of "the future will be amazing beyond our wildest dreams" stuff, but when you're talking that sort of timescale, I really don't see how you can use the word "impossible." Conventional wisdom is that technology increases exponentially. (I call it CW, because I don't know how you would actually measure it.) If that is correct, we'll make vastly more progress in the next 100 years than we did in the past 100.
And compare the present to 1907 in such areas as transportation, communication, and computation. Or medicine and our fundamental understanding of biology. Physics. Materials science. Energy. Our intellectual and technological progress has been phenomenal.
Where we'll be in a billion, or a million, or a mere thousand years, is beyond comprehension.
It's vastly different with "space colonisation". First of all, you gotta get off this planet. Not a trivial task. We barely get payload into orbit, and to leave the gravity of earth, you even need a bit more thrust. Then there's the distance. We're not talking weeks or months on the ocean, we're talking years and decades in interstellar travel. Air is limited and gravity isn't, problems that don't exist when "colonizing" on a planet. The Europeans who (re)colonized the Americas during the Renaissance had to take along their own food for the journey. Taking along your air is merely an increment to the difficulty. And when you arrive, your chances to actually get a hospitable planet are slim to nil. You will have to bring air, food, water and so on along. At best you'll have energy in the form of solar energy at your hands, and that's all you got. Presumably we'll pick a planet that will support us. Or at least one that's close, and send the automated factories ahead of the people. Colonizing the galaxy is possible. And I side with Hawking in the opinion that it is our destiny, if we want to survive as a species. But I wouldn't bet my money on a Star Trek like progress, where in merely 200 years we'll have colonies all over the galaxy. First of all we have to find a solution to the light speed problem. Yes, that's the big hurdle. Otherwise I'd say a comparison of present technology to 1807 technology makes the idea of galactic colonization very promising. But our present understanding of physics seems to suggest that there are certain fundamental problems that no technology can possibly bridge over.
http://www.ideacenter.org/contentmgr/showdetails.
No, let's call a spade a spade: s/inanity/dishonesty/
b) The term "junk DNA" was invented to describe pseudogenes, where are indeed "junk" in one sense of the term. From there it spread to other DNA Incognita, with the sort of casual disregard for semantic aptness that is a hallmark of humans' use of language. One thing I'm sure is that Nature doesn't waste resources, only Humans do, so each yet unknown thing has certainely a very good reason to be there. Lots of biologists used to make that same erroneous assumption, but Gould flagged the error 28 years ago. Lots of Slashdotters need to get caught up on that.
I see life, and am at awe of its complexity. I have to conclude something designed it. Strange logic. Why would "something" design life to be complex instead of simple?
Especially if, as you propose, that something is God? Couldn't an omnipotent Being just as easily have put our souls in cinder blocks and endowed us with telepathy and levitation, thus doing away with the entire overly-complicated edifice of biology altogether?
For that matter, why do we need bodies at all, whether biological or cinderblockical? Couldn't He have just created us as naked souls that live where He does? He doesn't seem to need a material world to live in; why should we?
(All that's just by way of pointing out that your "reasoning" isn't actually reasoning at all; it's just a post hoc rationalization of your beliefs. Please don't blame the messenger; it's nothing personal.)
Ok, I suppose it's still "useful"... as propaganda for the theocrat wannabes. And who knows, maybe some day God (pick your deity here) will reveal him/herself to us unbelieving humans and we'll be proven wrong. Supposedly the Christian God already did that. For some reason he did a poor job of the proof. (I can only conclude that He isn't as omnicompetent as He's cracked up to be, or else he doesn't actually care what we believe about Him. Or, of course, perhaps He's simply a myth.) Unexpected things happen every day. And magic (including Intelligent Design) has had precisely a 0% success rate at explaining any of them.
But who knows; maybe you're right and astrology will lead to the next big breakthrough in our understanding of the universe.
Thus there was an advantage to ID biologist who would have the opinion, 'cells are an incredible biological computer with beautiful design, this is great fun reverse engineering it all, and there won't be Junk DNA because that goes against God creating life, so lets keep looking for its purpose' Except that ID apologists explicitly deny any knowledge of who the Designer was, let alone knowledge of what He might have done in a design. So their current claim that their "theory" predicted this is an outright lie.
This is the usual sort of post hoc religious self-rationalization. If you pray for rain and get rain, your prayer was answered; if you pray for rain and don't get any, it was also answered - with "no", for reasons known only to the Rainmaker.
I haven't read the ID astronomer's book The Privileged Planet, but reviewers say he tries to have his cake and eat it in exactly that way: some aspects of the universe are hospitable to life, so a Designer must have designed them to make life easy for us; other aspects of the universe are inhospitable to life, so the Designer must have designed them to provide challenges for us.
If the (neo)con artists who are pushing ID as a science want to make predictions that diverge from the predictions of real scientists, well and good. But first they need to come up with a theory, or even a hypothesis, that isn't so slippery that they can spin any observation as support for it. Then they need to make predictions that actually follow from their theory or hypothesis, rather than just jumping on the latest news story and claiming "I told you so!".
BTW, the ID apologists' claim that this discovery isn't compatible with evolution is also a lie, or perhaps merely a sign of how ignorant they are of their favorite theory to criticize.
See the analysis of their current crop of claims at The Panda's Thumb.
IIRC their relics have proven useful in constructing the evolutionary tree, because the traces of a retrovirus that infected a common ancestor can sometimes still be spotted in the descendent species.
I'm not aware that any viruses have been "friendly", but presumably all retroviruses contribute somewhat toward our genetic diversity.
I'm not sure how widely accepted the idea is.
Also, "I don't see how that could have evolved" is not an argument against evolution. The universe isn't constrained to work according to the dictates of our childhood intuitions.
And that's not exactly news. I read it in a science popularization magazine years ago. First, evolution would weed that sort of thing out in a hurry. According to various science blogs, that's precisely what biologists originally thought. The evidence doesn't seem to support it, though. There's lots of strange stuff that goes on in biochemistry. Some sequences excel at getting themselves copied elsewhere in the genome. Boring old corn (maize) has a sequence that has had phenomenal success at that; it's spattered all over the genome, insertions amid earlier insertions of itself.
This has led to a view that we should think of the cell nucleus as an environment and DNA sequences as organisms, some of which evolve to exploit various properties of the environment. Those that can do that without also killing off the creature carrying them can prosper on their own terms. Second, ever tried compressing a DNA sequence? They don't compress very well! Meaning, they don't have much redundancy. It could indicate a lot of noise rather than a lot of efficiency. Random sequences are practically incompressible.
Again, the science blogs are reporting that Gould and a co-author called attention to the fallacy of assuming that everything in biology is optimized by evolution. They did that in 1979, over half-way back to the beginning of time so far as our understanding of genetic encoding goes. You're reasoning things out the way biologists did a couple of generations ago, but they've given up on both the reasoning and its conclusions.
Therefore, God exists! Sadly, the (neo)con artists at the Discovery Institute are making exactly that argument.
The argument is flawed as hell, but that doesn't diminish its propaganda value in a society where so many people are absolutely eager to be misled about reality.
The common view nowadays, AIUI, is that anything that is conserved over evolutionary time must have some function that causes disruptions to be selected against. But a lot of it -- the precise amount still unknown -- does in fact appear to be "trash". One of the blogs mentioned a paper whose authors described excising very long sequences from rodents' genomes, without any observable side effects.